Electronic multimedia resources have become increasingly popular in recent times. These resources take many diverse forms, such as hypertext pages including hyperlinks through to electronic photo-albums.
A hyperlink is an element of a web page that, when clicked with a mouse, allows one to call up another web document from the same or a completely different server. Hyperlinking is one of the principal methods used to navigate around documents on the World Wide Web. The traditional way of displaying hyperlinks on a web browser is to underline the word or words where the link is available. On colour systems or colour printers, the hyperlink may be shown in a different colour to regular text to give it added emphasis.
Typical techniques do little to enhance the distinguishability of the hyperlinks. Generally, the same font, style and font size are used to display the hyperlink meaning that they meld with the surrounding text, and this is especially true when hypertext is printed.
The existing electronic photo-albums typically take the form of a collection of images stored using a non-volatile memory device, from which a user can retrieve the image for displaying on a display device. Usually, the images are gathered in digital form, and may, for example, be scanned by an electronic scanner, down-loaded from the Internet or produced by a digital camera. A collection of these images can be stored electronically to create an electronic photo-album, analogous to the traditional family photo-album, which uses photographic prints.
Presently, electronic photo-albums take the form of a collection of images, a user of the album being able to associate a caption or brief description with each image. For example, a user can collect a series of family photographs of a wedding, whether from a digital video or still camera, and associate a caption such as a date and a brief description of the event with each image. If desired, an electronic photo-album can be reproduced from the memory device by a high quality output device, such as a high-resolution colour printer, to produce an album substantially similar to a conventional photo-album.
A caption is a text string, positioned on a page such that it is assumed to be associated with one or more images also located on the page. In general captions are used to describe the content of the images.
Traditionally, the style of the caption, including the font, colour, size etc, is decided on by the person authoring the page. In a system where images are automatically added, the user may find the style of the captions is generic and plain, and perhaps is not appropriate for the images displayed. For the user to alter the style of each caption can be time consuming and, in some cases, a complex task.